I finally broke down and setup a torrent tracker for MidnightBSD. We're still working out some bugs with it and could use some help testing. You can get the torrents at http://www.midnightbsd.org/torrents/
Once we get this working, we'll post torrents for all architectures for the latest release.
For those german speakers, we had a brief mention here. A good part of that section is about PC-BSD, but still interesting.
Today, I've been working on syscons, twa, twe, and tx. I've had some interesting suggestions brought to me regarding sub notebooks.
First, I'd like to start off with some good news. Our last few magus runs have shown a noticeable improvement in mports. The tree again appears to be stable with only 5 ports failing. Remember that you need to update your OS if you haven't already to take advantage of recent mports. It is a good idea to update your system anyway as we've had several security updates since 0.2.1 was released. I'd rather avoid doing another 0.2.x release, but it might be something for consideration for i386 at least.
The crazy merge we're doing is moving along. We missed the November completion date, but I feel that we've made progress. Each architecture has a unique problem right now and a few common ones. amd64 will probably be working first. The world can be built on amd64 and sparc64 now. i386 is only failing with pcc (which can be commented out). At this point, we're working on updating device drivers in the kernel. I'm in the middle of working on the ATA code. Sadly, some areas of the kernel had not yet been touched and I've brought many of them in line with FreeBSD 7. Other parts of the kernel had many local changes which require case by case decisions. I'm still not happy with this approach, and would rather have had more assistance maintaining.
Since we're injecting a large amount of new code into the project, there are bound to be many bugs at first. The new code has some known issues and the old code did as well. I will need useful bug reports from users. Please check tinderbox.midnightbsd.org before reporting compile errors with the code as I may already know about it.
The next question is what do we do now. This injection of code is not unlike the bsd 4.4 lite / UCB lawsuit situation from the early 90s for the other BSDs. The reasons are different, but it's a bunch of code to get cleaned up and put in. FreeBSD and NetBSD diverged greatly after that time period because they had very distinct goals as well as coders adding, tweaking and fixing here and there. I started this project to work on a desktop BSD. In the mean time, many of the other BSDs have gotten better on the desktop. OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly have decent wifi support. FreeBSD has been improving it for 7.x and 8.x. Many of them have loosely associated live cd/dvd projects now.
In order to make a list of areas we need to address, let's first consider the environment. I use MidnightBSD on some desktops, a laptop, many mports nodes, and several servers. For my own purposes, I often try to maintain some of the server elements of the system. It does aid me in finding bugs, but it also distracts me from the desktop environment. Over the holidays, my mother told me she got a new monitor. I asked her if she wanted to use the old monitor on her 700mhz celeron which has MidnightBSD on it. I had set it up as a backup computer for her some time ago. She was concerned about using something besides windows. I wanted to argue in favor of using MidnightBSD for her, but I realized that we don't have an intuitive system just yet for someone like her. When I first envisioned MidnightBSD, it was to make it for everyone. That task has not been completed (nor started in a satisfactory manor). So the obvious step is to pop a CD into a system, and try to set it up for a typical home computer user. There are many challenges to that task. These areas need to be met with our project first.
As we've discussed before, the installer is a priority and next on my list after the merge is complete. Combined with the installer, we'll have a beginnings of a decent live dvd. This solves the first two complaints I often hear if we do it right.
So what's next? What packages do we install? How do we partition the system? What features should be enabled by default? What should be a kernel module and what should be part of the kernel? What do we do about binary blobs?
These questions should all be answered by now, and many of them were. Things are different now. We need to evaluate some of these decisions and write up a clear policy on our website.
Two different sites are now offering MidnightBSD installation sets. The links have been added to the download page of our website. A portion of the sales for OnDisk.com will be given to the project.
I also want to update everyone on MidnightBSD progress. A few months ago, we had a discussion with developers and a few users about the future of the project and issues with MidnightBSD. The most common complaint about MidnightBSD is hardware support and the installer. There have also been feature requests for journaling file systems, ZFS, jemalloc, and .98 openssl.
When MidnightBSD was forked, it was done off 6.1 beta. We spent time fixing bugs that were corrected in the release version and adding hardware support. However, we haven't made significant progress with the base system. This defect has held us back. In part, I feel the steep learning curve to work with the src tree has discouraged new developers. Our mports system is working out well and we've succeeded in dramatically improving the experience and packages generated from ports. A good share of the credit should go to ctriv@ for digging in to the mess and designing something new that continues to get better. However, a ports system is not enough to keep us viable.
A decision was made to bring in select parts of FreeBSD 7 that we feel are useful or parts that we've not had time to maintain. It was a difficult decision because it meant we haven't yet separated ourselves entirely from their project. Other projects such as DragonFly occasionally bring in code from FreeBSD such as the ata code (nata in DF) or their latest approach at writing a wrapper for the network stack in FreeBSD Current. Haiku uses FreeBSD drivers, jemalloc and other parts and has successfully wrote a wrapper for many parts of the system they use. Still, this was something much larger. We haven't blindly imported the entire FreeBSD 7 environment as we have accomplished improving parts of the system, but it was still a large piece of code.
The work on this started in July and began to appear in CVS sometime later. The last two months have been a constant stream of merges, fixes, imports and more testing. At the same time, ctriv@ has been refactoring parts of the mports system to make it more modular and consistent.
The result will be a new system with many improvements and a few regressions. The changes will be present in 0.3-RELEASE. We do not have a very specific time table for this release aside from a target date of October-November of next year.
We have an increasing user base, but need more developers of all skill levels.
mports
As for mports, you can take advantage of the new changes by updating your system to the latest stable version RELENG_0_2 and updating your mports tree. A file was added to /usr/share/mk (src/share/mk) required by the mports system. Without this file, you will have make errors on some ports. This change has occurred in the last two weeks.
GUI
Many users have expressed an interest in our choice of desktop environments. GNUstep and many ports were updated recently. They work on i386 and often sparc64. The amd64 version of gnustep is not working and we're investigating that issue. Etoile is out of date and must be updated for the new version of GNUstep.
We also plan to ship KDE and Gnome in the next release. Until Etoile matures to a point it's usable, it makes sense to let users pick alternatives. Many linux distros have chosen to do a similar approach. Fedora has flavors. Other projects, like Ubuntu, have variations for use scenarios like education, or for desktop choice like Kunbuntu (KDE).
As the GNUstep project is aggressively moving forward, we don't feel it's a good time to count on it for our installer just yet. The amd64 issue is an obvious road block. Our plan is to write the installer in GTK for now and evaluate GNUstep later. Why GTK? It's not huge like QT4, and I have experience with it. We plan to include GNUstep on live DVDs in the future so users can experience it. I'll follow up in a later post.
There's been a flurry of activity lately with mports. We've added a number of new ports including qt4.
Results from our last magus run:
Magus is running again. It's the first run since 0.2.1-RELEASE. We've already found 20 ports that need some TLC and the run is still going.
Various security issues have been reported in the last two months. It is important that users update their OS if they use IPV6 or ftpd. Updates have been committed to our src repository. At this time, we don't have a binary update system, so there is no method to update in that fashion.
All patches have been applied to RELENG_0_2 which is recommended for 0.2-RELEASE or 0.2.1-RELEASE users. 0.1 users can get some of the updates on RELENG_0_1 (cvs branch), but it's recommended to update to 0.2.x as soon as possible.
We now have xfce 4.4.2 in mports. You may install xfce by using the new meta port mports/x11-wm/xfce4
We do not have a package at this time.
xfce
Today, I added an xfce port to mports. It is only version 3, but the missing gdk-pixbuf dependancy was finally fixed. In case anyone is curious, I had to use our port of libtool to get it to build properly with shared libraries. xfce 4 is very large so I don't know about supporting it right away. This was done after a user request for xfce. I don't care for it.
flock
linux-flock was updated to 1.2.5 today. This includes several security fixes and feature enhancements. For instance, Digg was added in 1.2. It also includes a working copy of flash player so you can enjoy youtube without much hassle.
I added a new port, deskutils/twitter which is a shell script that allows you to update your twitter account from the command line. usage is like:
# twitter username password "my entry here"
midnightbsd-backgrounds
Another port of interest is the x11-themes/midnightbsd-backgrounds that installs desktop wallpaper with the MidnightBSD logo. There are several variations created by myself and "smultron". We'll be adding more to that port at a later time. It currently installs in a way that KDE can pick up. We'd like to get gnome aware at a later time.
bind 9.5.0-p2
I've updated our bind 9.5 port to p2.
x11/themes/midnightbsd-backgrounds was added today. It includes several MidnightBSD inspired desktop backgrounds in PNG and JPEG format.
tags: mports midnightbsd
I've changed the frequency that ds9's cvs mirror updates. It no longer rsync's every 30 minutes, but rather every 6 hours. The previous cycle was giving people trouble over slow links.
I've created a new CVS activity blog. It will display the commits to MidnightBSD in real time. Since CIA.vc is having reliability problems, this is a way for developers to check on recent activity while avoiding the large emails on the midnightbsd-cvs@midnightbsd.org list. However, the formatting sucks and I don't have messages included yet. I'll try to tackle that after I get some sleep.
The upside to this approach is that we've also got RSS and ATOM feeds of the cvs history automatically.
This weekend, crash@ and I started updating Gnome ports to 2.22.3 (from 2.22.0). Not all Gnome related ports will be changed. Several bug fixes are included in this update.
We hope to have a magus run this week provided the updated cluster software is ready. ctriv@ has been working on parallel operation for nodes with more than one core. Some of the new GX270 dell systems the computer science department at Eastern Michigan University donated have hyperthreading. We also have 3 dual core systems with amd64 MidnightBSD available for runs (potentially). We may do a test run tomorrow if the software is ready. In this case, hyperthreading is beneficial. Often, the nodes are fetching files or in some way waiting on IO operations.
I just added viewvc to the website. You may use this in addition to cvsweb.
We've had a lot of mport activity this week. In particular, several dependancies were fixed for Gnome, mono was updated to 1.2.5.2 (and it's doc port), and crash@ is working on bugzilla 3.x. There are several new ports and portlint fixes.
I'm in the process of doing some merges from FreeBSD in our CURRENT for things we can't work on ourselves at the moment. This will be the last "large" merge from FreeBSD. We largely ignored certain aspects of the system as we were focusing on magus, mports, and general setup. After the merge is complete, we plan to diversify this project a great deal more. The decision to do this merge was a tough one and in the end it came down to a poll among developers. Most of us felt that we could benefit from improved hardware support, updated linux emulation, and jemalloc. Another words, we're using some of the good aspects of FreeBSD 7.0, but not the whole thing.
Assume CURRENT is broken and will not compile until November. That's my estimate on this. Upon completion, I plan to focus on the installer (finally). Our next anticipated release is 0.2.1-RELEASE for sparc64, followed by 0.3-RELEASE sometime next year. We hope to make 0.3 the last in the 0.x releases. That would mean a 1.0 release in 2010. If we're ahead of the curve, 0.3 might become 1.0. This comes down to usability and reliability.
Most of the requests after 0.2.1 have been for improved hardware support and changes to the gui setup. (graphical desktop) I've also had a few people complain about the 3 CDs. We're considering switching to DVD releases in the future (except sparc64). I'd like feedback on hardware support, and how many people still need CDs on i386 (x86). I think it's safe to go dvd with amd64 as newer machines tend to read DVDs.
The other request I've been getting is for a new live dvd. I plan on working on that in November as well. The installer project requires a livecd or livedvd anwyay. I've heard requests for GNUstep and KDE live dvds. Is there anything else users would like on them?
The sparc64 package build completed. It's taken like two weeks. We had 63 failures and 160 ports that were not tested. 57 ports were skipped. That leaves us with 1479 passes and 456 warns. Very good considering this isn't a highly active architecture.
I'm planning on rolling a release in the next week, but I am very busy so I don't want to promise a date. I doubt the line is very big for this one anyway. Packages will be put on the FTP server soon.
I just installed a new SSL certificate for www.midnightbsd.org. You can use it with cvsweb, etc.
I added several ports last night at the request of a user. Amarok is now available. I recommend that you grab the gcc 4.1 package before building as this will save you a lot of time. Without a newer version of GCC, I received several C++ errors. It sucks, but it's better than not having the port. GNUstep users will already have this installed most likely.
With that port, I brought in several additional audio libraries including support for Dell and Creative mp3 players.
I also updated the Opera browser and XChat.
Some of these ports may require more testing. ctriv@ is working on some exciting new features for magus so we must wait to run the new ports until that has been well tested. We're also setting up the build cluster at EMU again with some newer nodes.
One of the most common problems we've had is getting MidnightBSD. Previously, I wrote about a torrent available for disc1. One user has reported problems with that torrent. The other options are typically the mirrors.
The main site is currently rsyncing with two mirrors to distribute the new amd64 release. The site will most likely be slow for the next 24 hours.
I've been asked why I don't distribute using bittorrent myself. There are several reasons.
I did post a torrent using a third party tracker for 0.1-RELEASE and things went very poorly. The tracker was often down. I don't have the speed to run my own tracker. I can't get away with this at work either.
For those of you who can't download ISOs....
I started the build for 0.2.1-RELEASE amd64 today. If everything goes according to plan (insert Dr. Evil laugh) we'll have a release on the FTP soon.
Unlike i386, this version will not contain GNUstep or related ports. We had some build issues with GNUstep on this platform. Oddly, it appears to have built on sparc64.